Tourists come to Khutzeymateen to marvel at powerful grizzly bears

Khutzeymateen Provincial Park is a great place to see grizzly bears.

If you go down in the woods today, you're in for a big surprise.If you go down in the woods today, you better go in disguise.For ever bear that ever there was, will gather there for certain because today's the day the Teddy Bears have their picnic.

In Khutzeymateen Provincial Park it's more like an orgy than a picnic. These aren't the cute and cuddly Teddy Bears of Jimmy Kennedy's 1932 song. Gathering in Khutzeymateen are 1,000-pound grizzly bears.

No human is permitted to set foot in Khutzeymateen.

And who would want to? It’s home to about 55 grizzly bears.

The 44,300-hectare park, 45 kilometres north of Prince Rupert in northern British Columbia, is North America's only grizzly bear sanctuary.

Although nobody is allowed in the park, thousands of visitors venture up here in late spring to view the magnificent beasts in their natural environment. They usually encounter Ursus arctos horribilis by drifting in small tour boats along a fjord at the edge of the park.

May is one of the best times to go bear hunting with cameras and binoculars. The grizzlies are in hibernation until April deep in the coastal mountains, but in May they wander down to the shore of the fjord to eat the new spring grasses. And that’s when the boy bears try to date the girl bears.

It’s like spring break for the bears on the beach. Grazing on the shoreline goes on all summer, but May is the prime month for making new bears.

Another good time to spot them is when the salmon show up in August and September, coming in from the Pacific to spawn in the rivers and streams of northern B.C.

Grizzlies love this time of year. They leave the beach to go fishing in the teeming rivers.

Not only is there a restriction on humans entering the park, but also on the number of tour vessels allowed into the fjord in the Khutzeymateen Valley.

Two tour companies work out of Prince Rupert. Doug and Debbie Davis and their two sons operate the water taxi company West Coast Launch Ltd. For $225 per adult, $200 for teens, seniors and children, they carry passengers out in small tour boats for an eight-hour bear tour in the Khutzeymateen Valley.

Norman Aubin was a principal concierge at two of Vancouver’s finest hotels. But when he visited Prince Rupert and Khutzeymateen nine years ago, he was captured by the natural beauty of the area and its wild inhabitants at the provincial park.

He decided to linger there for a season. Ten years later and he’s still wild about his bears and their exotic neighbourhood.

Aubin is a guide on the tour boats operated by the Davis family. He can spot a grizzly from hundreds of metres across the water while it still looks like a tree stump. The boat moves in closer.

When we’re 30 metres from the shore Aubin cautions everyone in the cruising cabin to be quiet if they go out on the open deck. No talking, no fast or elaborate movements.

“The bears aren’t bothered by the rumble of a diesel engine, but human voices, particularly laughter, can spook the bears back into the protection of the forest,” said Aubin.

On our tour it appeared nothing was going to break the concentration of a large muscular, tea-coloured male grizzly that was trying to introduce himself to a female posing on a fallen log.

As if on cue with the arrival of our boat, he started chasing her back and forth along the grassy beach. Aubin told us later the bears can easily run 51 kph. And we saw that they’re as quick and agile when running along a fallen timber as strolling on an alpine meadow.

Males can weigh in at 454 kilograms. Aubin described their paws as “pitchforks” with claws 9 centimetres long and canine teeth of five centimetres.

A grizzly can break a deer’s back with one swipe of its arm, which looks as thick as a fire hydrant. The bears will eat pretty well anything, but their principal diet in Khutzeymateen involves sedges, the long grass-like plants growing at the water’s edge as well as sea barnacles and mussels. And of course gorging on fresh salmon that fight their way up stream to spawn fattens the bears up for hibernation.

The two grizzlies performing for us were amazingly human-like. During their courting tag game along the beach, she would slow down and wait and throw a fetching glance back over a powerful shoulder if he got too far behind.

Their courting stopped frequently for more grazing and at one point he went for a swim.

Debbie Davis said last year their tour boat saw grizzlies on every trip. Her husband has an impressive gallery of grizzly bear photos.

Many of her bear hunters are passengers from ocean liners that stop in Prince Rupert on their Inside Passage cruises between Seattle, Vancouver and Alaska ports.

This year the Davis' company, Prince Rupert Adventure tours, has hooked up with another bear man, Bill Lamburt. His firm, Canadian Classic Tours flies vacationers from Calgary, Edmonton and Saskatoon up to Churchill, Manitoba for a day of watching polar bears up close.

Now Lamburt will fly his tourists to Prince Rupert for a day to board a Davis tour boat and watch grizzly bears up close. The Davis grizzly tours start on May 9.

Another tour operator in Prince Rupert offers three-day bear tours. Dane Wakeman of Sun Chaser Charters has been conducting wilderness tours in the area for 25 years on his sailing yacht Sunchaser. His yacht offers all the comforts of home as it moors off the park for four days and three nights. Wakeman is author, with Wendy Shymanski, of the photo book Fortress of the Grizzlies.

Khutzeymateen was created in 1994 jointly by the B.C. government and the Tsimshian First Peoples Nation. Two Tsimshian park rangers live on a floating cabin beside the park for 14-day stretches and visitors are required to check in with them.

The rangers have a small grizzly information display in their station where they can show you the significant differences between the skulls of a wolf, a black bear and a grizzly.

And they’ll explain that when one ranger is barbecuing fresh fish out of the fjord for dinner, the other ranger has to stand guard in case any furry freeloaders swim over to join in the meal.

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